Author: Amy

So, in my ever floundering efforts to try to and get myself writing more, I joined a Slack started by a Twitter friend that’s focused on writing. We chatter about all sorts of writing related things, and generally try to cheer on and help each other out. So far I’ve been less than pleased with my results, but it’s the fault of things outside this group such as work and life stress, and everyone’s been pretty awesome so far. One thing we’re going to try out is a weekly writing prompt to encourage the creative juices.

Prompt:
The 4am Breakthrough #162: A Car Wreck In Repose: Write a short scene that takes place entirely inside a vehicle that has been in a serious accident. Let there be a driver and two passengers. All are badly injured, but all are conscious. They cannot escape from the vehicle, but the vehicle is not about to explode. Still, things aren’t good. Write about their perceptions and their fractured conversation in the moments before rescue arrives. 500 words.

The tiger shark paused on the other side of the windshield and met Kathleen’s eye, and she held her breath until it swam off again. Wait, swam?

Drip.
Drip.
Drip.

She turned and looked at the window to her right and saw water pushing its way from under the weather strip she’d been telling Steve to replace for the last three years.

“Kath? Vic?” Steve reached over to lay a hand on Kathleen’s knee, and looked over his shoulder to the backseat. Victoria sat with her head back against her seat, staring up at the growing wet spot in the drooping headliner.

“What the fuck just happened?” The teen finally lifted her head, meeting her mother’s eye through the rear view mirror.

“Last thing I remember, something hit us. It was moving too fast, I only saw a blur and then we were through the guardrail on the side of the bridge.” Steve pushed aside the deflated airbag that covered the steering wheel, searching for the horn. When he found it, a sickly muffled meep was all the reward he got. “Hopefully someone saw us go.”

“Rescue equipment is going to take a while to get here, even if they did. How much air do we even have?” Kathleen unbuckled her seatbelt and pressed her face against the window trying to look up. A water drop hit her in the eye and she pulled away from the window with a start as she furiously blinked the brackish water out. “It’s not that deep here, is it? Couldn’t we just swim up?”

“Oh my gawd, Mom. Do you even know how much force that water will roll in here with if we open a window to get out? And we’ll lose all our air when we do it.” Victoria unbuckled her seatbelt and dug into her pocket to pull out her phone. She poked at the touchscreen for a long minute, flicking and biting her lip. “Fuck. No signal. Nothing.”

“We have to do something.” Steve jabbed the window controls, and there was a small jerk and then nothing. Water started to trickle through the top of his window as he unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned over to yank open the glove box. “Be ready to move, I’m going to break this window. Ready?” He pulled out an orange tool with a small cone shaped hammer top on one end.

“Right behind you, dear,” Kathleen said, leaning in to give Steve a kiss on the cheek.

“WAIT!” Victoria yelled, throwing herself forward, grabbing her fathers arm. “We need to wait for someone to come get us. We won’t make it. We won’t.”

“It could take hours, and we probably don’t have that much air. Hush now, take deep breaths and be ready to go as soon as your father breaks the glass.” Kathleen gently pulled Victoria’s grip from Steve’s arm, awkwardly putting her arm around Victoria’s shoulder.

So, as I mentioned in my last rambling, I bought a new computer. I went with System76, because I felt it was important to buy a machine that was sold as a Linux machine first and foremost. Partially because it meant I knew it wouldn’t take a lot of fussing to get working (and let’s face it, I’m a lazy Linux user, and have been for nearly 13 years now), and partially because I feel it’s very important to vote with my money, and buying a machine that comes with Windows preinstalled is basically a vote for Windows hegemony even if I immediately wipe it and replace it with a flavor of linux.

Now, of course, because I’m the crazy and masochistic sort of Linux user… after I ordered a nice shiny machine that came with a working distro installed on it, all shiny, new, and working perfectly… what do I do with it? I format and reinstall. Granted, part of that was because it didn’t come with /home as its own partition, and part of it was because I thought it would be good to start with an absolutely no bloat distro, instead of just installing the desktop environment I wanted in the default ubuntu install. I had so much fun that first weekend I had my new machine. >.<
It took me forever to figure out why I didn't have a gui preference panel for keyboard stuff (wasn't installed, yay!), just so I could enable the compose key... because the non gui solution involved preference files that had a lot of other settings I didn't need to change, and ubuntu based things changed the files I needed to look in to verify that I was copying my current settings... but because ubuntu has a gui solution, it was hard to find command line and preferences based solutions for it when running a derivative without the gui panel. So much fun. And bluetooth still isn't working the way I want it to. Audio quality was all messed up, and for some reason it didn't want to pair with the mouse I bought... so I'm stuck usinng the usb dongle I didn't want to have to use.
All that said, I am pretty pleased with the new machine. It's zippy, has lots of space. It's lighter than the old machine, bigger screen, number pad. Would have been better if I'd known to leave well enough alone... but what can I say, would I truly be a Linux user if I did? 😁

To the assholes who constantly roll ahead on their right hand turns without looking at the crosswalk first, then wave me along like they’re doing me a favor when they finally notice me glaring at them for trying to run me over? Fuck you. With a flaming broadsword.

So, I recently gave in and bought a new laptop. I was long overdue, my old one was seven and a half years old, a machine that had been a gift and was admitted by the gift giver to be the cheapest model in stock at the Best Buy on his way home from work on my birthday. Yeah. It was a Toshiba Satellite that survived a drop on concrete and a drop on tile, yet somehow continued to mostly work despite damage to the power jack so that the power cord couldn’t reliably maintain contact to power it unless it was sitting just so… and the battery had long given up the ghost by the time it hit that point. Somehow, despite all that, I still managed to milk seven and a half years out of it before it reached a point where I couldn’t make it reliably work anymore and had to dig into the savings account that I’m trying desperately to accumulate enough money in so I can buy a reliable car.

I mean, even though internet and computer access is pretty key for daily life these days, I guess I feel a little guilty buying myself a new machine knowing the mess we’re staring down right now. So I guess I’m trying to justify it to myself, and using this blog post to verbalize it? The thing is, I am barely hanging on in the bay area right now, so I gotta figure something out that’ll enable me to pay the bills… or I may need to give in and look at moving out of the area. I would really hate to move, because I love it so much here, cost of living aside. At least, I seem to have lined up some part time freelance work to get a little extra money coming in. Waiting on the final details to gel, and I’m not sure how long it’ll last or if it has a chance to pan out into more work later, but for now… a little extra money isn’t a bad thing, even if it doesn’t directly extend into something else.

I’m not even sure why I’m writing about this, but I set up this blog to try and make myself write regularly, so let’s just focus on that goal. I got burnt out because the last election cycle was just that draining… and now that the idiot in chief has been in office for a month, it’s pretty clear that it’s not going to let up unless he’s impeached, and even then… Pence is a pretty scary too, but he at least plays by the conventional rules. It doesn’t help that the GOP still thinks they can control the Cheeto faced idiot, so they’re ignoring and stomping out every effort by the Democrats to try to get the impeachment ball rolling. I can’t help but wonder if they’re trying to hold off on the impeachment until the midterm, in hopes that Pence will have less than half of idiot’s term to serve, leaving him open to two reelections. Scariness.

In better news, I am trying to push myself to take more pictures again. I need to do something creative that gets me out of the house. Now that I have the new laptop, I’ll try to make an effort to post the pictures for people to see if they come out well enough. I do have a site set up for it, brassfrog.net, though I need to do some work on the theme, probably add a child theme to it. We shall see. I also use the heck out of VSCO on my phone, adjusting pictures with filters and snapping interesting things when I spot them when I have time to stop and snap the picture. I’ll try to get those posts on the photo site, but some of them have been posted to VSCO’s site or twitter. So they’re out there.

I used to write these stream of consciousness posts on LiveJournal back in the day, and while I don’t know if anyone will read it (not even sure if I care if anyone does), I do miss writing whatever comes to mind like this. So I’ll try to do this, even if I don’t have something a little more conventional to write.

So, I’ve been a little quiet here lately. I had been overwhelmed by this toxic election cycle, and in the end, I did cast a vote for Hillary… not that it mattered much, since California always goes blue. I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter retweeting messages better phrased than mine, considering all the voices that are shouting right now. I am terrified of where this country can go under the leadership of Trump. A man who is surrounding himself with assholes who are racist, sexist, and generally hateful individuals with no respect for anyone but people like themselves: rich white cis het men.

People talk about wanting to get out of here, hell, I’d heard that the Canadian emigration page was crashed on election night as more and more of the middle states went solidly red. I don’t even know if that story is true, but it doesn’t really matter in the end… anyone who thinks they can just leave the country and escape this hasn’t been paying attention to the world lately. That’s easy to do, with how much the US media has been failing us, but that could easily be a whole post of its own and I’m not ready to rant on that. I came here to share.

Someone has built a website called #AskTheElectors, where they’ve collected as much contact information as they could about how to contact the actual people who are going to cast their votes in the electoral college come December 19th, specifically the ones who do not have any sort of legal binding to vote the way their state elections went. Because our schools fail so badly, a lot of people don’t fully understand how our election process works and don’t understand why the electoral college exists, nor do they realize that they’re not actually voting directly for a presidential candidate, but instead a person who has pledged they’ll vote for your candidate of choice. The constitution outlines this electoral college process, but it leaves it up to the states to handle how to allocate their electors. It’s also left up to the states what, if any, penalties an elector will suffer if they vote differently than they pledged, and as mentioned above, some of them will suffer no legal penalties at all (I don’t say they won’t suffer no penalties, because these days the electors are selected by a party often to reward loyalty and service, and turning against the expressed will of the party will have consequences).

While I am not holding my breath that this effort will work, as I fully expect loyalty to their party will continue to do what has happened since this election cycle made it clear that Trump had enough of the population behind him to become the Republican nominee, I took the time to use the information on #AskTheElectors to compose an email of my own to make my plea for them to change their votes. Knowing that the chances were slim that the email would even be read, especially since it was likely to become a tide of people participating in this long reach, I’ve decided to share it here too, though I will leave out my personal information.

Dear Elector,

My name is Amy [=====], from [=====], CA.

Since the results of the election back on the 8th became apparent, I have become more and more afraid of where this country is headed. Watching the hateful actions that are the result of racists feeling legitimized by Trumps win strikes fear into my heart, and the whole world holds their breath as they watch where we go from here. Countries that have long been known to show no regard for the rights and safety of their citizens are cheering for Trump’s win, Russia’s even admitted to making efforts to sway the election results.

Donald Trump has spent his whole campaign telling the American people that he’s a racist sexist man who has nothing but his own self interest at heart. He has spread one bald face lie after another, supporting and encouraging hatred and fear wherever he goes, and showing that he has nothing but disrespect for what our country stands for. On top of his personal conduct being appalling, his choice to surround himself with racists, homophobes, and sexists reflects poorly upon our country.

The popular vote has far and away shown that the American people who did vote wanted Clinton to be our next president. On top of that, this was the first election in 50 years that did not benefit from the full protection of the Voting Rights Act. There were many states that either reduced early voting or enacted strict voter ID laws. Both have been shown to disproportionately affect those who are low income and of a minority background, both groups that have been statistically shown to vote largely Democrat.

Part of the role you play as an elector in the electoral college is to represent the best interest of the people. Even though the average person thinks they’re voting directly for a presidential candidate, they are actually voting for you to represent them. In a normal election year, where the popular vote and the electoral vote agree with each other, it’s a pretty easy process… but when the popular vote and the electoral vote disagree, you owe it to the people you represent to take the time to really consider why that is. Sometimes it’s just because it was a close election, but the conduct of the two candidates this election year, as well as their history and actions, are like night and day and show that this isn’t just a close race.

It is your duty to look beyond party loyalty, and ask yourself: Which candidate is best prepared for the job? Which candidate will put America’s best face forward? Trump claims to want to ‘Make America Great Again’, but what makes America great is the diversity that he is clearly against, what makes America great is that we learn and grow as the world changes, but Trump wants to take us back to the past that we’ve outgrown.

Please, change your vote to support Hillary Clinton. Help us more forward instead of back.

Thank you for your time and consideration, I appreciate and respect the role you serve in our electoral process.

Sincerely,
Amy [=====]

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”
-George Bernard Shaw

Even as I reread it before publishing, I find things I could have adjusted, punctuation and grammar I might have handled better… but I knew if I did what I normally do in writing, I never would have sent the email. So what I am publishing here is exactly what I sent out.

Be respectful in the comments (not that I expect any, as I’ve not received any here before) and be aware that I have no qualms about using the ban hammer. While I feel strongly that the first amendment is a very important right, and feel that part of what got us to this point is the popular trend to hide from political conversation, I will not suffer hate speech and I will not tolerate or feed trolls spreading straw men and fallacy.

So, because I’m a complete n00b, I didn’t realize that I needed to create a child theme instead of modifying directly the theme I’d selected… so when an update was pushed to the theme I’d started from *poof* it was all gone. Annoyingly I’d read up on child themes and thought I should take care of that before the worst happened… and then didn’t make time before an update pushed that did it. Yeah.

So I’ve set up the child theme correctly now, but I haven’t finished correcting it the way I wanted it. So things may be a little messy for the short term here. Sorry!

With all the hot topics being political lately, I’m having a hard time coming up with a topic that isn’t politics for this week. I don’t want this to turn into a political blog. Fuck knows, there’s a lot to say, a lot that needs doing, so if I wanted to make this a political blog, I certainly would have enough fodder. I’d also feel obligated to spend a whole hell of a lot more time reading up on political stuff, and I just don’t have the energy to do that. Particularly the emotional energy because so much of what’s going on lately is so frustrating or heartbreaking. So, let’s talk about something a lot more light hearted today. As I mentioned in Time and Divergence, I run a Star Trek RPG online called The USS Joshua Norton. We use a content management system called Nova, and the game is very much a collaborative writing project. For the most part, players come up with a character they wish to play within the setting, and craft a bio, then they either write by themselves or with others about events that happen in the setting. The command team function similar to how the Game Master (Dungeon Master, Storyteller, whatever) does in a tabletop game, but without dice involved, we focus more on the overarching plot and the bulk of the NPCs, though the players can, and often do, write some of these too!

Currently, we have a murder mystery on the side of our official mission. The official mission is pretty simple: we have a visiting Romulan Delegation on Earth, and the crew’s job is to keep an eye on them and see if any useful information comes up. Nothing unexpected has come up, which is why when the CO’s brother, Noah, shows up asking for help because some strangers are trying to kill his friend who saw the strangers kill a retired intel agent, Amelia picks a few of her crew to look into it. So far it smells of a cover up, and one of the mysterious men killed himself rather than be interrogated. A Ferengi overheard some information, which he sold to the Romulan delegation, and now we’ve got a race between them and the crew to reach evidence hidden by the dead retired intel officer. To add to the stakes, the crew has reason to believe that the big secret the retired intel officer was murdered over was the true story of how Captain Sisko brought the Romulans into the Dominion war — something that even though Starfleet HQ knew some of the story, they didn’t know the whole of it, and even the partial story could be enough to unravel the delicate peace between the Romulan people and the Federation.

Here’s a sample of one of our recent mission logs: “Want Some Whiskey In Your Water?” I like to use song lyrics for log titles, that one comes from Three Dog Night’s Mama Told Me (Not To Come).

Zola settled down at her terminal in her quarters, and opened the secure channel with the Latinum Star. She knew Catalina was off the Emperor, and guessed she wouldn’t be back for a while, but she’d set up a notification in the computer in case her roommate beamed back. Negotiations were delicate work, and though her brother was better than some of their species, someone he didn’t know, particularly a female, would put him on the defensive. Also, he’d spend more time leering than talking. Zola needed information, so it was a risk she couldn’t take.

“Ah, Zola, my favorite little sister,” he cooed at her as the channel connected, his wrists pressed together and his fingers curled in front of his chin as he nodded his head in greeting.

“Ah, Nug, my doddering senile younger brother. I am still the eldest, even if I found a shortcut you didn’t,” she returned in kind, extending the same gesture of greeting. He bared his teeth at her with a growl, and she smiled wide. “How’s business?”

“None of yours.”

“Funny you should say that, as Broq apparently did make it my business,” she returned. A frown passed Nug’s face, and Zola lifted her hand within view of the screen. She slowly let the gold pressed latinum tumble from her fist. “My friend acquired this from Broq, or at least I assume it was Broq, since he’s usually not stupidly aggressive unless there’s latinum already involved. I was told he was spitting in my friend’s face.”

“So they were Starfleet,” Nug said, and Zola laughed.

“Bold assumption.”

“Return Broq’s property.”

“Rule of Acquisition number one, brother,” she chastised, waving her finger at him. “We could negotiate what the return of his latinum and other property is worth to you though.” She settled back in her chair, crossing her arms as she waited for his response. He frowned and chewed his lip as he considered. “Though I’d be happy to give you what was his if you just push him out the airlock instead.”

For a little context: Zola and Nug are twins, with their Moogie having raised Zola, and their father having raised Nug. Presently, Zola has lived fewer year, despite having been born first, due to an unexpected one-way trip through a time traveling worm hole. Their Moogie had collected on Zola’s life insurance and bribed her way into the divine treasury long before Zola’s reappearance, so in order to avoid being brought up on fraud charges, she continues to act as if Zola truly is dead. The only family who acknowledges her as alive are her brother and father. She doesn’t really miss Ferengi society, because she’s never understood the drive to collect profit, so she’s been just fine continuing her career in Starfleet since the wormhole incident.

When I got into the conversation with my boss recently about Clinton vs. Sanders, the thing that hit me the most as I pondered it afterwards as how firmly and repeatedly he was trying to give me the message that I needed to get in line, that all of Sanders supporters needed to get in line. Repeatedly he said things like ‘if there was a better candidate, I’d vote for them in a heartbeat’ about Hillary, and instead of telling me why I should vote for Clinton, he spent his time telling me why Bernie didn’t deserve the vote. These are not the ways to get someone to vote for your candidate. This is how Kerry lost to Bush — No one wanted to vote for Kerry, they wanted to vote against Bush, and that’s not how you convince the swing voters. This election cycle is looking to shape up the same, there are a lot of people who aren’t supporting Clinton because they want her, they’re supporting her because they don’t want Trump.

Part of the reason why so many of the Sanders supporters are still holding out, why so many of us are still voting for him or planning to vote for him in the remaining primaries, is because we believe in his message. We know that not all the things he’s talking about are going to actually happen, especially if we don’t also get progressives to fill the house and the senate to back him, and even if we give him a happy majority in both it will be an uphill battle. Regardless of how much of what he’s trying for he can actually achieve, we believe he will give it a good try and his goals are the things that we as a country need. We believe in him and his message, and most of us are voting for him, not against Trump, Clinton, or anyone else.

I can accept and even respect someone who actually supports Hillary because they’ve considered her position on things, even if I disagree with them, because while I dislike a lot of things about Hillary, I don’t believe that the things that they’re aligning with her ideologically about make them horrible people, and they’re actually selecting a candidate they agree with. The people who are just saying ‘Sanders has lost, we just need to accept Hillary is our only hope’ when they don’t actually agree with what she stands for are going to be the weakness in the campaign. Yes, we are subject to First Past The Post voting, so in order to get the candidate that most agrees with us we need to strategically vote, but that shouldn’t mean that Hillary’s campaign and supporters should use fear to convince us. They need to tell us what’s good about her.

As an aside, if you’re not familiar with the term First Past The Post Voting (also sometimes known as Winner Takes All voting), or if you don’t know why it’s bad for pretty much everyone except for the powerful minority, please take the time to watch this video. Also check out more videos by C. G. P. Grey to follow up on this subject: talking about alternatives to FPTP such as Alternative Vote (also known as Instant Run Off voting) and how Gerrymandering works. I highly recommend them because it breaks them down into really easy to follow examples, which are great if you’re trying to get the point across effectively.

The other experience I had recently was I was having a twitter conversation with someone I follow. She’d been expressing her dismay at how there’s a type of Clinton supporter than accuses women who are supporting Bernie of not being Feminists, and I starting talking about my boss mentioned above. She and I were pretty much on the same page, and then a Clinton supporter @ mentions both of us, telling us they don’t understand us. Now, instead of doing the logical thing that one would do when you don’t understand, you know, asking questions so that maybe you can, she instead links us to a blog post that was trying to insist that Sanders isn’t a feminist. Pretty sure that the definition of Feminist is still striving for equality between the genders, and things like raising the minimum wage to a living wage, affordable health care, affordable education, and reproductive freedom all further gender equality. Particularly when the majority of minimum wage earners are adult women, and the way to pull themselves up from minimum wage jobs involve being able to maintain one’s health, further their education, and be able to make informed, safe, and healthy choices about when and how they reproduce.

So, how about this Clinton supporters? If you want my vote, tell me why I should vote for Hillary. Stop shouting doom and gloom about Trump being elected. Stop telling us we’re not feminists because Bernie’s an old white man. Stop telling us we’re young and stupid, entitled and delusional. Woo us, tell us what’s great about Hillary. And if you can’t? Why don’t you try to affect change and hold her to task. Quit starting negotiations at the middle ground because you think you can’t do any better, aim high so that when you have to compromise you end up closer to where you want to be.

One thing I hear a lot of people comment on is my choice to use colorful metaphor so frequently. The word fuck is not foreign to me, actually it’s probably one of the most comfortable to slide from my tongue because it’s so versatile — whole comedy routines have been written how multi-talented the word fuck is. And the number one thing that will stop me in my tracks and make me lose respect for someone? When they call me out on my use of these colorful metaphor because of my gender. While I’ll disagree if they just try to tell me that I should watch my language, as long as there’s no indication it has anything to do with my gender I will make a good faith effort to respect their beliefs up to the point I respect the person who believes them. But the moment anything indicates they find it okay to curse and swear, as long as there aren’t women present, my respect for that person just dries right up; sometimes I even find myself cursing in their presence more simply because I am so offended by their sexism.

I’ve been lectured that it makes me seem base and crass, and that I should respect myself more than that. I’ve been told to my face that the person speaking to me knows that I’m intelligent, but because I choose to use more base language that I come across as stupid. My experience has been, anyone who can’t hear what I’m actually saying because I pepper my sentences with fuck when I’m angry is actually saying more about themselves than they are me. Words have the power we give them, the meaning we wrap them in with the sentences we construct for them… so why does a simple little four letter word like fuck have the power to just overshadow everything that surrounds it? Simply because we as a society choose to give it that power.

A genius of a man, George Carlin, had a lot to say on these sorts of words. He had a delightful routine that discussed these sorts of words in detail known to most as the seven dirty words. If you’ve never had the pleasure, or if it’s been a while, I certainly recommend you take the time. This clip of it is a little over fifteen minutes, but well worth it.

Comedians are the ones allowed to poke at society where society says no one is allowed to poke. They soften the blow by wrapping it in a metaphor or provoking a laugh, but the best ones have a lot to say under their jokes. That’s part of the reason why Jon Stewart was so successful with his run on the Daily Show, because under all that humor there is a man who is very knowledgeable about politics, who has a sharp mind with opinions to share, and he did it in a way that a large chunk of society enjoyed watching it. He said things that a lot of us agreed with, and some of what he did created waves and got attention on things that might have otherwise been ignored.

Anyhow, back to my original thread: how did we reach a point where one little word with four letters has become so powerful that it can stop everything and everyone around it like it’s a freeze ray or a magic spell? It’s the language equivalent of a flash bang for so many, where they hear it and suddenly their ability to take in anything else just is gone. I recognize that language is a collaborative construct to help clarify meaning in communication, that words are given meaning by what everyone agrees upon… I just don’t understand how one word so small has been given so much power.

I run an online Star Trek RPG known as the USS Joshua Norton, and for those of you who aren’t familiar with this form of role play game, it’s pretty much a continuous work of collaborative writing. Like a Tabletop RPG, a game master (or rather the command team in this case) lays out a plot line for the characters to encounter and fills in details like major events that occur and additional characters needed to flesh things out. Which is to say that as someone involved in creating these plots, I spend some time thinking about the established lore of Star Trek.

While talking with crew on telegram (You should be using telegram, it’s a great program. Go download it on your phone, I’ll wait.) the topic of time travel came up. Not surprising, really, given that it’s been a theme touched upon since the original series — one of the best known episodes is City on the Edge of Forever after all — and it’s been a popular topic ever since then. Even outside Star Trek, time travel is often touched upon, with one of the best known classics being H. G. Well’s The Time Machine.

One debate that comes up if you delve into the topic much is whether time is stubborn and tends to stay mostly the same even if you try to mess with it, or is it fluid and susceptible to ripples from the smallest change. I read a story once that involved a guy trying to stop his own death, but the universe was so determined to not change the time line it sent a little asteroid right through his forehead where a bullet originally went to kill him. (If anyone knows the title and author of this story, please remind me in the comments!) The other extreme is the originator of the term the butterfly effect, A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, where a guy steps on a butterfly and changes everything when he’s returned home. Doctor Who likes to dance between these two with its talk of fixed points in time intermixed with wibbly wobbly balls of timey wimey.

Star Trek seems to lean middleish, though more towards Sound of Thunder, but I believe that all these theories don’t have to be at odds. Start by looking at how Star Trek has handled divergent time lines, particularly Mirror, Mirror and the JJ ‘verse, one major event can split off a noticeably different alternate time line. From there, consider that at any given moment there are any number of situations occurring where there are multiple potential outcomes: for example someone steps off a curb and there may be a car coming or not, if there is a car the driver could react or not, maybe not even see that there’s someone there, the speed of the car upon impact can affect the chance of the hit person surviving, as well as variables like health, which people are on scene to render aid if anyone, which doctor is at the emergency room to offer care. If we assume that each of these variables caused a fork, that these options — and more than we didn’t list — played out by spawning a new time line, that’s a whole hell of a lot of time lines spawning every moment of every day.

How does this mesh with Sound of Thunder and Time Is Stubborn? Well, with every outcome producing its own time line, both scenarios play out as well as everything else in between. It’s just a matter of which line you observe as to what you are inclined to believe. There are bound to be time lines where all observed divergences are Sound of Thunder type ripples, and others where everything stays on the straight and narrow path of things not changing at all because the universe finds a way to nudge it all back on course with creative solutions. Statistically speaking, most time lines out there are going to be exactly what we’ve been shown in the Star Trek universe: a mix of predestination Paradoxes, time being stubborn and falling back into line when events are nudged back close to what they were before, and the smallest events changing causing the largest differences.

I want to write-up an entry on the Norton’s LCARS about time travel, but I suspect that it’ll take some more thought before I can craft something of particular use to my crew. I may revisit this topic again another week.